Adivasis (indigenous people in Southeast Asia) are stuck in an intergenerational cycle of malnutrition.

What makes it far more serious is the fact that most of these people aren’t even aware of it and its impact on the quality of their lives. This malnourishment — passed over generations and transformed into an unfortunate cycle — needs immediate attention.

To fight this problem in the tribal belts of Odisha, India, the state government partnered with theAzim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives (APPI) to improve maternal and infant nutrition through strategic interventions in some of the most backward areas. One of these is the Rayagada district of Odisha, identified as one of the Prime Minister’s high burden district with regards to malnutrition.

APPI and their implementing agency Living Farms partnered with SocialCops to not only monitor their “Farm-to-Plate” model, which ensures that adivasi women and children get a balanced diet, but also manage their program’s impact across 2,153 villages in the Rayagada district of Odisha. The decade long initiative takes a multi-sectoral view at malnutrition by creating sustainable models for better nutrition, such as encouraging communities to come together and build nutrition gardens in their backyards. Community members are also sensitized about the various food grain and ration related benefits under government schemes and how to leverage nutritional resources provided by nearby forests through LANN PLA meetings.

To facilitate real-time impact measurement and dynamic course correction, APPI and Living Farms leverage our data intelligence platform to bring together all the data they need to make better decisions and improve the program’s outcomes.

They use Collect, our mobile data collection platform to continuously capture information about the community, record community meetings, track the decisions and its status, and measure the impact of the planned activities and initiatives. This data is then visualized into an easy-to-use, intuitive dashboard which is used by the program team to keep track of what’s happening on ground and take decisions to improve program progress.

“This data captured on mobiles when plotted on graphs and shared with the community will help 300,000 Adivasis get a balanced and diverse diet.” – Debjit Sarangi, Managing Trustee and Founder, Living Farms

Watch the video case study to learn more about this project!

Watch Hrishikesh Parthasarathy (Vice-President, Impact at APPI) talk about why nonprofits and philanthropies must embrace data-driven impact management as a fundamental process to improve their decision-making in this video.